WHAT IT'S REALLY LIKE.

My usual tendency to carefully work through my my personal process here has led to this rather autobiographical post. I am dealing with anger over an incident which occurred on Thursday afternoon in our neighborhood. Three young Black men in a group simultaneously spat at Peter as he passed them in an isolated area which exits our nearby shopping center. They laughed at him in derision as they walked on. 

Peter, a man of 66 years who walks with a cane, was stunned and angered. When he arrived home, I shared his anger and was grateful that he wasn't harmed. Peter was the victim of a notorious gay hate crime here in Boston. He and his partner at that time were stabbed, beaten and left for dead by a Black street gang in 1990. Homophobic insults were yelled by the assailants during the attack. Many neighbors, also Black, watched the attack from their stoops and did not intervene. The neighbors also refused to identify the attackers, who were known to many of them. This happened before this was considered a Federal hate crime. The Boston Police implied it was Peter's fault for living in the South End and did nothing to solve the case. 

Peter and I now live a quiet life. We became the most intimate of friends almost thirteen years ago, in 2003, after meeting through an online site for gay men. I responded to Peter's profile, which described his feelings of isolation as a cancer survivor in the gay community, I too was recovering from radiation and chemotherapy treatments for the same cancer. Both of us have been living with HIV/AIDS for around 30 years. That is not an achievement; it is more like living out a life sentence on parole. 

We came of age in the era of civil rights demonstrations and cultural revolution here in the U.S.. We are in our later years with birthdays seven months apart. Both of us grew up in homes with immigrant grandparents from Eastern Europe. Both of us had parents from poor families which were plagued by alcoholism while struggling at hard labor with low pay and long hours. Contrary to minority misconceptions, all Caucasians do not belong to the upper 10% of American society. 

Peter and I were both first-generation college grads in our extended families. He had a tougher time getting there than I did. His upbringing was marked by neglect due to parental alcoholism. He had no support, psychological or financial, in his quest for an education. Despite this, he worked his way through college doing menial restaurant jobs and factory work. As a soft-spoken gay adolescent, his struggle was fraught with homophobic abuse from heterosexual males on all fronts. His achievement of an education and a subsequent career in publishing is no less than heroic in my eyes.

My educational path was assigned to me by my overachieving parents, a bipolar policeman and the adult female child of an abusive alcoholic blacksmith from Lithuania. "You will be a doctor or a dentist." There wasn't any easy debate in our house. Despite attempts by my athletic father to shape me in the image of himself and my older brother, I rejected team sports and excelled in academics. This was the beginning of my alienation from heterosexual men and the heterosexual women who bowed to them. 

I strove to escape, and did. I initiated application to a Jesuit prep school on my own. I was awarded a scholarship, despite poor entry exam results. I gladly commuted from my hometown for 90 minutes each way on bus and train every day. Full academic scholarship at a Jesuit university after my junior year was my reward.  I entered premedical studies out of a sense of filial duty. I was still thinking like an enslaved Roman Catholic. The Jesuits cured me of that disorder. Their intellectual subversiveness was like a fine wine. I also got drunk almost every weekend on Old Turkey rot-gut whisky to tolerate the overwhelmingly heterosexual social life, based in sporting events and related parties.

After college, life in the 1970's for gay men, as I experienced it, became very "binary" in today's terms. As bullied men who were standing up and saying "No more!", we defined ourselves by a somewhat monolithic sexuality. We were gay, not bisexual or curious or gender-questioning. Our ideal was later actualized as The Castro Clone, a rugged-appearing, gym-toned man in tight clothing with facial hair, patterned on the style of gay men in our mecca, The Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. Harvey Milk, the leading icon of that gay era, was elected to city government from The Castro. The subliminal message of the Clone look was, "We are homosexuals, and don't mess with us. We have an army."

It seems the U.S. government paid attention to that message. Peter and I both lived the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York and Boston. Neither of us believes that the worldwide spread of HIV/AIDS was just an accident of Nature. Certainly, the lack of response to it was no accident or mistake. It was overtly intentional. Thus ended Gay Liberation. Eventually evolved the era of LGBTQ Rights, rising from the loosely cohesive ashes of the homosexual population's remarkable response to HIV/AIDS. The death of much of the leadership of the Gay Liberation Movement from HIV/AIDS left behind a traumatized and fractured gay/lesbian population in the U.S. and across the world. 

We have worked hard and taken many risks to achieve some recognition as human beings. I was the first openly gay nursing student to join a national gay nursing group in 1975. I became the only out gay male nurse in the state hospital where I worked after I graduated nursing school. My colleagues and I in the Gay Speakers Bureau of that era braved obstacles to give presentations in schools and community organizations. One potential employer denied me a job twice after my coming out during interviews. I went back a third time and worked in that facility for nearly eight years as an open advocate for LGBT patients. Later on, I worked in an AIDS hospice. Peter's work life in New York was similar. He climbed from being an out gay temp to being an art director in publishing. 

We are both retired now. Our resources are limited. Our health is a matter of constant vigilance and maintenance. We live in a transitional neighborhood in Boston, which is experiencing a development boom. As single gay men, we both moved a lot over the years, usually from one marginal or transitional neighborhood to another, due to increasing rents and stagnant salaries. This neighborhood offers us public transportation and nearby services in a shopping center which is largely patronized by various communities of color from the Roxbury and Dorchester sections of Boston. Peter and I are comfortable with our minority status at the shopping area. We like to walk rather than drive, so we amble over there regularly. 

Thursday evening's event was disconcerting. Worse for Peter, who has PTSD from his previous near-death experience. But he was back at the shopping center this afternoon. He got himself together after lunch and pushed himself, cane in hand, to go back there. After all, we both have come to understand that this is what it's like for two old gay men without a lot of money in urban America.

I suppose a young person from a minority background might look at us as objects of scorn or as oppressors in these times of reignited racialism in America. Any younger person might resent us as representatives of a generation which seems better off, and may well be. I accept those judgments in stride. That is a form of compassion. But no nonviolent and well mannered person deserves to be spat at or derided by a gang in public, regardless of the motivation.